My favorite color is green

My favorite color is green, and this is my yard:

It crunches when I walk on it.

This is a Mediterranean environment; no one’s grass is green.  I’m not even sure it’s grass; maybe it’s crab grass because each year it gets likes this and happily, it comes back the next spring.  The thing is, it usually not this bad nor is it so prolonged.  The yard has been like this for a month and a half, which is a record and, summer’s not over yet.  It would be completely absurd and irresponsible to even think about watering the grass since it would reduce the water supply for something so frivolous, but I ‘ve noted that doesn’t stop others from trying.  (As if a green lawn is not going to give away a secret.) 

The yard is not the only thing suffering; all the vegetation has taken a hit.  It’s been a hard summer as the trees, bushes, and flowers have tried to bounce back from a particularly brutal winter with freezing temperatures and bone-chilling winds.  We trimmed back a lot of new growth from the year before this spring because it had died from the head spinning winds.  What’s left has had a hard time regenerating.

The ground is dry and the sun is unforgiving. I’d have better luck breaking cement than trying to break ground.  Even my succulents are crying out for water.  We never got the seasonal spring rains so reserves are plunging and plants are digging their roots in deeper in hopes of finding something to drink.  Those that are surviving have been around awhile with well-established roots or it’s due to us watering them from time to time in hopes they’ll make it until in the next rainy season.  This is a hard environment and I am learning just how unforgiving it can be.  I should be happy that cutting the lawn has been tremendously limited, but a green lawn is something I miss.  That, along with anything green around me, anything.

Autumn's fruits

This is a photo I took in the garden today.  That’s right, it’s late October and I still have tomatoes.  We live in the middle of the Pyrenees Mountains and I can still go out a few times a week and load up a small bucket.  Tomatoes this time of year are sweeter than summer tomatoes and generally have a thicker skin, which we remove, but they are still amazingly good.  It’s hard to believe, but we’ve had tomatoes as late as December.

The area in which we live is a Mediterranean climate; it may not be right next to the sea, but we’re not that far.  Our summers are generally very hot and dry, autumns are very windy, and winters temperatures can vary from day to day.  We’ve had 3 foot snow storms just after days in the 60’s.  It is overall warmer, sunnier, and drier than the weather I knew growing up.

About 5 miles away from here – as the bird flies – the climate is quite different.  There is another village on the other side of the mountain range that is very similar to one in which we live, but it is quite cold and damp.  We have watched storm clouds roll in and follow the mountain crest that circles us all while never receiving a drop of rain or a single snowflake.  The mountains create a climate that is extremely localized, either trapping warm air or creating a mini freezer, so the weather report for the nearby city cannot be generalized. This is quite different from the flatland of the Mid-West United States where I grew up.  Yes, there might have been more lake –effect snow in one area of another, but never have I seen such variance within such a small area.  It has taken some adapting, like getting used to hurricane force winds, and realizing that tornedo warnings have been replaced by forest fires reports, but such localized temperatures is something I’ve never experienced before.  And I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would ever grow fresh tomatoes so late in the year.



Just to show the single tomato above is not the sole tomato still growing